The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [6]
Papa Laurent told a different story. “One day, Morty,” he said, “the feeling of loneliness will be precious to you. You’ll be glad that it formed such an important part of your sentimental education. The UN may make a big song and dance about keeping Earth’s population stable and using emigration to the moon and the microworlds as a safety valve, but the simple fact is that now that your generation really can live forever the population of the Earthbound will creep up and up and up. The future you’ll have to live in will be so desperately crowded that there won’t be any lonely places left—and you’ll have something to look back on that all your contemporaries will envy. You’ll have an understanding that they’ll never be able to cultivate—although the monks will hang on to it, if they ever manage to recruit any true emortals.”
They were both talking nonsense, of course, but not for the reasons that occurred to me as a child.
Perhaps, in the end, my parents’ plan did achieve most of what it was intended to achieve, even though they could never agree as to exactly what that was—but while I was actually living in the parental hometree I could not help but see things differently. I found some delight in the ruggedness of the terrain, but I also felt a good deal of resentment against the continual assertiveness of wind, water, and biting cold—and my curiosity about the perverse people who had chosen to live here, not merely for a while but indefinitely, grew along with that resentment. Even at the age of eight, I knew that I would never take the trouble to learn a new language in order to communicate with the enigmatic people who lived at the other end of the valley, but I knew that there would come a day when I was big enough, strong enough, and brave enough to climb the mountain that separated me from Shangri-La.
I did not expect that I would be able to talk to its inhabitants, even if they turned out not to be extinct, but that was not the point of the imagined endeavor. The point was to confirm that Shangri-La was indeed a place, not a phantom of the cloud and a mirage of the sunlight—and to prove that I was the kind of person who could go wherever he wanted to go, despite the vicissitudes of the weather.
FOUR
My failed attempts to climb the mountain that loomed so large over my childhood home resulted in a few bruising falls. I listened patiently to the lectures all emortal children must endure regarding the magnitude of every risk they take, but I also learned by slow degrees how to use an ice ax and how to make the most of toeholds. My parents decided soon enough that in view of our having chosen to live among mountains it would be ridiculous to suppress my ambition to climb, so they began investing in smart suitskins with all kinds of extra safety features. By the time I was ten my augmented limbs had the clinging power of a fly’s, and if I rolled myself up into a ball I could bounce for miles.
I took more risks than the average child of my kind, but the falls I survived didn’t lull me into a false sense of security. My suitskins were exceedingly clever and my internal technology was state of the art, but when I fell I experienced a full measure of terror, and more than enough pain to function as a warning. I was, however, determined to master that slope some day, to find out exactly how the reality of Shangri-La differed from the fantasies I made up for my VE-linked friends.
I was twelve before I accidentally discovered the source from which my co-parents had borrowed the name Shangri-La. It was, I found, the name of a mythical monastery established above an imaginary valley, whose